Honestly, Ms. Klein, Author of NO LOGO & 350.org Board Member – You Really Don’t See This Intentional, Psychological Manipulation of Citizens?

“As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Obama is a “brand” like none other, having won the highest advertising campaign accolade and attracted unprecedented sums of money. The brand will sell for a while. He will close Guantanamo Bay, whose inmates represent less than one per cent of America’s 27,000 “ghost prisoners.” He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.” – John Pilger

“Every brand comes with a set of associations,” explains study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of psychology and marketing at Duke University. “When we’re exposed to logos, those associations fire automatically, activating our motivational systems and leading us to behave in ways that are consistent with the brand image”—and our preexisting drives. Over the years, all the Think Different ads we’ve seen have seared a link in our brains between Apple and creativity… — Psychology Today

“With enough repetition, people encode the brands identity (usually not as read words but as the recognized look, shape and feel) in their brains, preferably linked to things that matter to them.” – Branding Strategy Insider

“So the original brands were comforting logos that were often people, like Quaker Oats or Aunt Jemima, that were essentially surrogate relationships, it’s like, ok, you’re not buying it from the local shopkeeper, you’re not buying it from the local farmer, but here is this image that you can relate to – you could form a personal relationship – albeit a fake personal relationship – with this mascot, with this figure. But the message was that you can trust it as much as you would trust it if you actually had a real relationship.” – Naomi Klein

“And this idea was the idea of lifestyle branding, the idea that if companies wanted to be truly successful and competitive in a global marketplace they had to understand that their true product was not their product, i.e. sneakers, movies, lattes, computers, it was an idea, a lifestyle. It was meaning itself. The idea of brands not products explains for me a few things at once. It explained the assault on the public sphere in the form of corporate sponsorship. It explained why we were seeing evermore new and creative forms of marketing particularly directed at young people.” – Naomi Klein [Source]

“The point is that you don’t have the choice whether or not to turn it off because it is in the streets, it’s right in front of your face, on the subway or even in the bathroom, in a public bathroom. The point is to take choice out of the equation because choice, even when you can click with your converter, that is seen as the enemy in the world of marketing, that’s why you need to get your ad woven into the content of television shows, so choice is taken out of the equation.” – Naomi Klein [Source]

“There are a handful of brands that understood that marketing could play a larger role than simply branding their product as a mark of quality. They understood that they could sell ideas, that they could sell lifestyles. Coca-Cola, Disney, McDonalds – these core American brands became powerful precisely because they understood that they were selling ideas instead of products, that they were selling an idea about family.” – Naomi Klein [Source]

When Klein stated that Obama followed the logic of creating “an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts,” who would have known she was describing, with astounding accuracy, the very faction that she affiliated herself with, the following year on April 7, 2011. Whether Klein’s words were a self-fulfilling prophecy or simply bad judgment, one can only speculate. However, one thing is certain, the “committed wing nuts” Klein speaks of have only become more delusional in the years that have followed as Obama leads the world in the race to the bottom. Who knew that fascism, invasions, occupations, corruption and drones could be so appealing? – Keystone XL: The Art of NGO Discourse – Part II

To many, Obama’s very presence in the White House reaffirms the moral nation. He is a marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein or Beneton, he is a brand that promises something special – something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be a radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s post-modern man with no political baggage. – John Pilger

Caption on above photo by Mike Hudema of Greenpeace: August 1, 2013: “This is at the future site of Jane Kleeb, from Bold Nebraska’s: “Build Our Energy Barn” inside the proposed #KXL #tarsands pipeline route…if you come to the Neb you can get your picture taken with it.” [Source: Facebook, Tar Sands Blockade]

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"Unlike the Latin American left, the pathetic European version has lost all sense of what it means to do politics. It does not try to propose concrete solutions to problems, and is only able to take moral stances, in particular denouncing dictators and human rights violations in grandiloquent tones. The social democratic left follows the right with at best a few years delay and has no ideas of its own. The “radical” left often manages both to denounce Western governments in every possible way and to demand that those same governments intervene militarily around the globe to defend democracy. Their lack of political reflection makes them highly vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and to becoming passive cheerleaders of US-NATO wars. That left has no coherent program and would not know what to do even if a god put them into power." - Jean Bricmont

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